


Miryam's Journals P.I.

by optimouse



Series: Marchaue [3]
Category: Highlander: The Series, Oz (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, M/M, casefic, sex trade
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-01
Updated: 2012-05-11
Packaged: 2017-11-04 15:56:40
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 8,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/395575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/optimouse/pseuds/optimouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Sex is always for profit, it’s just sometimes the profit is emotional and not monetary.”<br/>Miryam and Ambrosius have hunted each other since the days when Demosthenes railed against Philip the Hegemon. Now Miryam works for the FBI's Sex Crimes Unit, and Los Angeles has a criminal enterprise that reminds her of a great many things that she would love to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

            Chapter One

            I’m a five foot one, 105 lb, Immortal. Pretty generally that would mean cute and fast and fuckable: that’s  what Connor MacCleod said the first time I met him, but with me, as I get onto the subway in the morning to go to work, it means that the nice young man who also works in my building, likes to give his seat up to me and stand next to me on the train. He also walks me home in the evening from the metro station, as he lives near the stop just a bit further away from my apartment than the one I use. I pretend that I don’t know that Jonah is walking me home in an attempt to keep me safe from muggers on the days when I work normal hours, but I suppose I appreciate it just the same. I’m an easy mark as a frail, middle-aged woman who looks like she may shortly be collecting social security benefits.

            As it is, I’m a pretty trustworthy FBI agent in my division. Unlike my partner, a six foot something ex-soldier and former college wrestler who damn near went pro, I don’t have a fifty/fifty chance of scaring the victims that we deal with. The FBI generally doesn’t deal with Sex Crimes, and honestly, there’re only two divisions in the US of the FBI who do specialize in Sex Crimes. One is in New York and vaguely affiliated with Jack Malone’s team that works on Missing Persons. Ours is here in Los Angeles, and we deal mainly with sex trafficking over the border. There’re three teams, one that works a great deal with LAPD Vice squad: I’m not quite sure what they do. There’s the second team, on call to any federal crime in the West, and then there’s us.

            There’s SAC Roth, and no, that’s not David Lee, as he is so fond of pointing out to everyone in earshot. It’s William, and apparently to his friends, it’s Billy. He’s five eleven, military-short hair, and in fact he transferred to the FBI from NCIS after realizing that he liked being a Fed, but wanted to work with sex crimes. Apparently that realization was brought to his attention by his second, our former SAC.  SSA Dwayne Duane, and he wants to, on occasion, ask his mother what she was thinking when she named him that. I could tell him that they were giving her drugs to help with the birth, but morphine’s an opiate, and this type of thing happens. He’s also not originally from the Bureau, he did a stint in the Detroit Metro PD before his wife Lorraine’s job was relocated to LA, and they decided to follow her more highly paid job. His new job with the Feebies apparently makes up for the change in cost of living, and hers has allowed them to start thinking about kids in the next few years.

            Jordan Holland isn’t particularly interesting, early thirties, and sometimes I think that she got into sex crimes because they thought sex crimes a good place to put an agent who may’ve committed some to get into the FBI. I’m still amazed at the fact that her partner hasn’t died in the line of fire and her shooting evals be brought up for discussion. Her partner, Jon Heavey, has kindly tried to apologize for her last insult far too many times for a crime that wasn’t his own.

            And then there’s Tony and I. Tony’s named Anthony Farressi, standing six foot six, I think he may weigh 250 lbs minimum, and wears his hair just longer than the military issue bowl cut and a wedding ring. His suits have to be tailored for his size, the Big’n’Tall store doesn’t stock black suits that big, but thankfully he married into the kind of money that allows him to get that done. Plaid suits don’t really suit in this day and age, apparently.

            I’m the one on the team that doesn’t fit the typical profile of our type of team, according to the Assistant Director. I was head-hunted from white collar crime by Roth. Apparently my skills with forensic accounting were the clincher, but the attraction was my age. There are certain things that Tony, for example, can’t go undercover. Apparently one of those is a prospective brothel madam.

            And that leads me to today. Our contact is Mrs. Nella Thomas, a former housewife who had, in the wake of her husband’s death and the realization that she now had no income, had decided to become a brothel owner. I’m still fuzzy on the internal details, but I’m not entirely certain that I want to know them as we sit down together at a small café with plenty of plants between the tables to create a privacy that is not the illusion of folding screens.

            The thing is, none of the plants surrounding us were actually giving us any privacy. The tiny microphones that my partner had stashed in the potted plants all around the room told Tony and Duane, outside in the truck, every last bit of information that our informant was giving to me, helping to set up my cover.

            For the sake of this mission, I’m Marianne Webster, forty-something. I came into Los Angeles to talk to Nella, who used to run one of the two girls who are currently a part of my stable. Actually, stable is the wrong word. I’m just out of the city working in a tiny town that _supposedly_ has just enough money to support one tiny escort agency. As an entrepreneur, my cover personality would like both herself and her girls to have a little more financial solvency, and thus to move to LA. The purpose of the charade, the cover, is part of the information that Nella had recently given us.

            So here I am, listening to Nella prattle on. I like her, and it’s in her favor that she came to the Bureau when she realized that some of the women that her co-workers were running were two things: illegals, which wasn’t that much of a problem for any of us involved, we’re not Immigration, but the true problem: coerced into the business, and then sold. Sexual slavery done over state borders, and probably national borders.

            Nella’s smart, giving us the essentials to setting up a brothel or escort service financially, but not giving us the whole on how she recruits workers. I’ve already got a good idea, based on the time I’ve done in sex crimes, plus a good two and a half millennia of experience, on how she recruits, but I’m appreciating, purely from the three years I did in accounting work in the last decade, the kind of strictures that she places on her work’s finances. She includes a pension and health care plan for all of her workers.

            Ah, there’s the squib in my ear. Poor Farressi, he’s got to be bored stiff. He may admit that finances are helpful in solving crime, but that doesn’t mean that his wife, pretty little business exec that she is, can’t send him to sleep by reading her stock reports to him.

            “So how’ve you been, Marianne?” And it’s the beginning of a relationship—this meeting is taking place technically undercover. Thankfully, Marianne is a broad-enough used name that I can go by it while undercover. Besides, Nella’s been a confidential informant for the FBI in the past, which I find refreshing. Of course, it’s Sex Crimes, and it behooves us, as Agent Roth has stated in the past, to keep an eye on and get to know the more legitimate side of our concerns. People like Nella can be truly helpful, as they take a dim view of a great many misbehaviors that Sex Crimes ends up investigating. Plus, as they are legitimate members of the community, they have a damn good reason to be involved with some of the same things we are, where as it’s quite hard for us to place an undercover agent for every bit of information we need. And perhaps I’ve mentally rambled a bit? I am supposed to be speaking to Nella, and not myself. “But, Nella, call me Anna.” I smiled at the other woman, and layered my  voice in dual meanings. “Thank you so much for helping me put together the information I need to move the business here, you’ve been so kind.”

And Nella, with her silvering blond hair set up on her head in a french twist and the gorgeous dangling Swarovski crystal earrings that sparkle like the green of her eyes smiles at me, and for a moment I’m caught. There’s a world of potential in her eyes, and for that I admire her. She came to us with the information, and I recognized the hand behind it, we did not ask her for help. Sometimes the hand of the Fates can be seen in this, the hand of Nemesis, justice.

Nella did not have to help us.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter Two

            I didn’t want the assignment. Maria Alvarez wasn’t that much of an interesting Immortal, even if she was in the Federal Government. Looked about early sixties, avoided the game at most costs, and her history with the Watcher’s was pretty boring. Didn’t get killed by the Kurgan because when he’d shown up in a town that she’d been in during the fifteenth century, swinging that big damn blade of his. She had screamed rape to the Inquisition-crazed town that she’d been in. he was a seven foot tall wrecking ball in their nice Catholic town, and she was Maria Alvarez, second wife and then widow of Jose Alvarez, whose son was now on the town council and well liked. He spent five years being inventively questioned by an area Inquisitor while the widow Alvarez was sent to live with her cousins near the border into modern-day France by her stepson, where she quietly died falling down some steps two years after the attack.  And that was it. We, as in the Watchers, are pretty sure that her first death was that death, falling down the steps.

            Her teacher is where her history gets shaky. I _think_ , based on some artwork that she keeps at her apartment, that her teacher was Ramirez, who barely half a century later taught Connor MacCleod. Of course, she’s also in artwork with two identified Immortals:  Melvin Koren, and Evan Kaspari. She’s always looked the oldest in any of these pictures, however, when painted with Ramirez, they looked matched in age. Perhaps he was the best to train her. He certainly is recorded as being in the correct area to train her at that point in time, and he was in the same town as she was at the time of her funeral.

            Having worked in the Sex Crimes division with her, I think that I’ve changed my opinion some. She’s physically older than most immortals, and she makes up for this fact with training. Not, I might add, the intensive daily training that Joseph Dawson reports of his charge, Duncan MacCleod. Four times a week she attends tai-chi classes at the gymnasium nearby, three times a week she attends a Krav Maga class at the Y taught by a fellow member of the FBI. Her time training tops out at three hours, usually two, with the spare bits filled in by running. Every once in awhile she drags me out to the nearest national forest and takes me hiking, enforcing what Vivian, my wife, calls the Chanel rule: always take off the last thing you put on. I’ve learnt that my water bottle is more important than my compass.

            Maria Alvarez’ last Watcher was a priest, a Father Ray Mukada. It still surprises me that the little woman whose most heated prayers are ‘Jesus Christ on a pogo stick’ took vows, let alone the dedication to a nunnery and a calling that she had maintained for almost fifteen years, and an alias for even longer.

            To my understanding, she only left Sister Peter Marie Reimundo behind when she decided to take a student.  Two identities later, Marianne Raydles, ‘call me Mary, everyone does’ was born. She worked for white collar crime here in LA, and she was doing a brilliant job until a case came across her desk that was white collar crime and sex crimes. Back then, only two people were even actively involved in investigating federal sex crimes in our area, and that was Agents Roth and Dwayne. According to what Jon Heavey told me, Mary started investigation through white collar crime of the sex issue. She’s brilliant with finding out what happened through receipts, who went where through bank statements, and that case and her solid work on it were what brought her to SSA Dwayne’s attention, and Agent Raydles was the first agent that SAC Roth and SSA Dwayne had transferred to their command when they received permission to form our unit.

            Watching Agent Raydles speaking with Mrs. Thomas, I can’t help but wonder if the Watcher on Matthew McCormick, also an agent, has observed his assignment with the same eyes that I do. There seem to be many ways that my Immortal’s immortality, her history, informs her current position. Sex crimes? She was affiliated with German brothels in the seventeenth century in Heidelberg, according to her Chronicles, as a midwife. She helped aide the prostitutes in their lives, kept them healthy and patched them up when a patron had painful tastes or a moral mob decided that they had cause for issue with them. She apparently died a death there, and was smuggled out of the city by a Karl Priori, a fellow Immortal who intervened in an Immortal youth’s attempt to take her head while she was dead, his status as an immortal confirmed only by his body’s acceptance of the young Immortal’s Quickening.

            Agent Raydles is wired, and the microphones in the greenery surrounding her are all feeding out to a van in the parking lot of the restaurant, and I can overhear more of the conversation that she is having with Mrs. Thomas.

            They’re going over financials, which should be helpful. When I joined the Sex Crimes Unit and was assigned as Mary’s partner, I thought that the specialty in investigative finances was silly, especially the seminar that we were all being asked to take. Three months later and the deposit of a very large check drawn from the personal account of a state senator and into the personal account of a young lady with a set of very interesting profile pictures on ‘Sexxy Young Vixxens’ [you can have one as a timeshare!]. The young lady later turned up dead, but in possession of a check from another person and a very round set of new breasts, and we had a break in the case that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

            Apparently how a brothel decides pay is essential, even if it is illegal to operate a brothel. I’m starting to tune out as my true role today is to Watch for the important things, not the silly things. My job here in this café could be performed with a tape recorder.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

            Mary’s fear of the Kurgan had come to her honestly. It wasn’t that he scared her more than most immortals scared her, the millennia of her life having given her a healthy respect for the majority of Immortals’ ability with their swords comparatively to the frailty of body that she held as her reality.

            Her current student enforced that reality. Kareem Said had very nearly become Omar’s student, a vague line-cousin of Mary’s whose specialty was with the flamberge, and whose religion was Islam, if not the variant that Kareem Said practiced. Her choice to pass him on as a student to a line-cousin had been nearly made, not because she was less than fond of Said, but because she wasn’t sure how her style of life would help the more  impulsive man.

            That was something that she wasn’t sure how she wanted her co-workers to see her relationship with her student. She’d managed to teach Kareem about swords against a smaller partner, and he was well acquainted with the necessity of an exercise regime, but there were some things that she couldn’t teach him. In a less troubled world, she would’ve asked her teacher to work with Kareem in regards to working with his size in combat. Instead, she’d chosen another option.

            The issue was Kareem Said’s issues with homosexuality. He’d been born to a lifestyle impermissible to those who loved the same sex, and the whole idea of the ‘down-low’ had permeated his childhood. His conversion to Islam and its modern interpretation of the Quran and men who lay down together had not improved that state. He managed a tense ability to work with those who made that choice, however, he was prone to the occasional moral rant on the subject—it was starting to irritate Mary.

            Mary’s history with the subject dated back even into her youth, before her first death.  Her father’s _oikos_ had not been incredibly rich, but they had enough money to retain one household slave, a woman named Moka. Moka’s main duties in the household were to do the things that the citizen women, her father’s mother, wife, and four daughters including Mary, could not do and be considered chaste. In fact, Moka had been inherited from her father’s father, and had accompanied Mary’s grandmother into their home.

            Father hadn’t had large amounts of money, and the _oikos_ ’ main income was not from the weaving that the women did or the small amount of vegetables they grew, but rather from his small investments in shipping. Instead of owning one ship outright, he’d bought shares in five different ships, which helped ease the worry that often plagued the shipping business that the ship would go down and they would be bankrupt. His two sons, one had taken an apprenticeship with a shipbuilder and the other had joined a ship as crew.

            Mary had been a year from when she had been married to another man in her father’s _deme_ , and she had yet to meet Niko. But that wasn’t really what she was thinking about. She’d started to bleeda month before the wedding, and she hadn’t been bleeding yet when she’d seen them, not understanding anything of sexual arousal that young.

Grandmother and Moka had been entwined together, in the women’s quarters upstairs. In retrospect, the physical aspect of her grandmother and Moka’s relationship was no surprise, and it would probably not have surprised her father, but as a child, she’d wondered as to the purpose of the writhing together of the same sex. Of those of male and female writhing together, it made Mother’s bleeding stop, and had given her a round belly and then a little sister only months before, but between two women?

Her understanding of the world as a child had been enclosed by the nature of an oikos, her life as a female child within the household. Kareem Said’s understanding was similarly informed by his youth, and the first hundred years of his life would determine the rest of his life, as the first hundred years, first as the Clan Chief of the MacCleods’, then as Connor’s student informed Duncan MacCleod. The first one hundred years was necessary, in Mary’s mind, to impress the need to develop the ability to easily adapt onto her students.

Her first thought had been to ask Methos to assume the education of her student: the relationship that her teacher’s brother had with their mutual brother was undeniable in its strength and its reality. The problem that Mary had realized with that plan shortly before she made the call was that Kronos’ ability to deal with those unwilling to bend tended to be an attempt to break them. His seven students and their highly populous lines [and the survival rate of students] did nothing to sway her opinion on that.

Besides, the lifestyle that they maintained was nowhere near stable enough for her preferences on how to teach her student. A better thought, she’d decided, were those very decisive men, line of Martos.

There were some in-jokes to the immortals. The trade line, Ceoc, his student Lorne Skele, and their student Dade Winston, had become the direct opposite to another line within the student line descending from Martos. Finn’s line, Mary’s least favorite of the bunch, had chosen their specialty a great while back, and she’d first run into them a few years after her first death.

But Kareem had spent the last three years on and off with members of the trade line, working on languages and adaptation, not to mention the business and investment skills Ceoc had nurtured in his two students. He’d learned, Mary hoped, that sometimes no matter your pride in your religion, in your mastery of self and submission to a higher power, adaptation and renegotiation of how you see yourself was necessary to allow survival. His return to her for more teaching surprised her in some ways. She was not particularly special, and when she’d received his phone call three days before informing her that he would be arriving in Los Angeles, and asking to resume their teacher-student relationship she would admit to being puzzled.

She was a woman, physically a modern-sixty, but she’d actually died closer to forty-something, her hair shot with gray and osteoporosis was nowhere near as bad as it could have been, but it still had an effect on her build. She survived by running, by manipulation, deception, and misdirection. What did she have to teach to a student whose embrace of nobility was such an integral part of his being?

And hell, how was she supposed to explain the six-foot something man suddenly cohabiting with her?


	4. Chapter 4

 

Chapter Four

            Miryam got up every day at five thirty to let the cat out onto the porch, and then got back in bed for half an hour. She officially got up at six, even if she got in the shower at six thirty and rushed through getting dressed for work and getting the cat’s food ready so that she could eat breakfast at 7 am and start walking to the subway at 7:15, she had to be at work at eight.

            Work was across town, the Federal building. There weren’t that many agencies in the US that the Immortals ever stayed in for very long, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Sex Crimes division was not an exception to that rule. Miryam had decided that for awhile she could get away with staying, and unlike Matthew McCormick who constantly reinvented himself to allow himself to stay on the East Coast of the United States and in law enforcement, she found that in smaller cities and in niche jobs, the age that she’d died at allowed her to remain for a longer time period in one job.

            The eighth floor of the Federal Building, and her office was a desk next to her partner’s in a bullpen. On day two of an official operation, she was actually going in to work in the office. In five more days, she wouldn’t even return home, even though her student was there, and her cat. And gods, Mary was still smarting after that conversation with her student.

_~Flashback~_

_“You’re a what?!” Kareem was yelling, and Mary couldn’t quite understand why he was both yelling, and yelling about this. Praise be to Apollo for the foresight to pay to have the walls soundproofed. “It’s not anywhere near safe!”_

_“Safe?” And then she was shouting back. Sometimes she thought that the arguments that her teacher had forced her into, mathematics, science, religion, political debates, in spite of their time and her sex had been his greatest gift. He’d forced her out of the retirement that her Athenian upbringing had forced her into, honing her into using her anger instead of suppressing it. At least Kareem hadn’t remarked on the propriety of her work for her sex. “I’d have thought Ceoc would’ve beaten it into your brain that the Immortal who cannot protect or understand themselves is a soon to be dead Immortal?”_

_“That’s why you sent me away?” And there was anguish and puzzlement in her student’s eyes, and she could not neglect to address this and still be able to look herself in the mirror and truly know herself, to ignore this would be to betray herself. “Sent me away for seven years!”_

_“I gave you an option, Kareem.” And there had been three, but she’d nudged him towards Ceoc, and at times wished that the paired ones were still alive, they would have been brilliant teachers for her young student. “There are things that I cannot teach you, or things that you will be unable to learn from me. How to meet a challenge without any attempt at escaping the option is something that I will do my damn best to teach you, but you cannot learn from me because I’ve so rarely practiced it, and even now, only for less than kind purposes!” Mary’d taken a breath, forced it out and the calm in, and tried to be serene. Allowing the anger had its problems, such as the control that her anger tried to exert over herself._

_“You abandoned me.” And it was true, but it was also a lesson that they both had to learn. Kareem was her fifth student, one dying young and at the hands of the Kurgan, another a victim of the ragamuffin boy, one alive, and one still dead, no matter that she was still surprised that the gas ovens killed him, and that the flames of the crematorium kept him dead. “You swore to keep me as a student.”_

_“And I kept my promise, Kareem.” And then she breathed, hoping her words would get through and eliminate that part of the anger from abandonment. “Not every teacher and every student are perfectly suited, so what I could not teach you, I found someone who could. Can you now take Dade in combat?” And Dade was huge, reminding her physically of the bulk of the Kurgan, maybe of Silas’ bulk as well, but certainly of Silas’ temperament._

_And there he nodded. “I could not teach you how to do that.” She breathed again, and he breathed, matching her breath, and Mary was glad that her lessons from long before had paid off in some form. One could convince another person to become calm if one could keep oneself calm. It did not always work, and it was no magic, like the Cassandra’s voice, but more akin to Silas’ animal whisperings. Self confidence was the key to it, and she was glad that she’d been able to find some. “I cannot teach you of happy relationships, when I have not had a close relationship with one who was not my student within three centuries.” Her pupil’s eyebrow went up, and she considered how to address that, but he was nodding. “Ceoc and Lorne have maintained a solid relationship, and even young Dade is balanced well with them. He sees them, and I have not heard of the relationship gaffes that you may’ve already heard of.”_

_“MacLeod?” Kareem offered._

_“Connor was so in love with Heather, his beloved wife that he still mourns her yet, not that I do not mourn a husband, wife, lover or student that I have buried, but more that he loves her to the near-exception of all others.” She smiled briefly. “He will learn eventually, but Duncan has developed expectations of_ _relationships that can be hard to inhabit.”_

_“You’ll never find a lover in the Bureau.” And there, at last, they were back on the original argument. “And you could be discovered.”_

_“I was recruited from white collar crime, Kareem.” And then his eyebrow was raised. “I hadn’t left a desk, other than to appear and testify in court in four years when I was recruited for Sex Crimes.” She was starting to laugh, because it had been so vibrantly different than what she had been doing when she’d met him._

_“You stayed behind a desk.” And now he was laughing. She’d always had patience, but a drive. The drive was what had convinced her, he thought, to take a student, and as this was the first time he’d heard her number the students that she’d had, never having named them to him, she was opening up. “Why sex crimes?” Implicitly, he hoped, why sex crimes and undercover as a madam?_

_“Because everyone deserves to be protected, Kareem. Prostitution disgusts you, but marriage was to me, when I was a youth, very similar to prostitution. I was sold by my father to my husband Niko, in return for shares in a ship.”_

_“It’s still sex for profit.”_

_“Sex is always for profit, it’s just sometimes the profit is emotional and not monetary.” And it was her honest opinion that that was so. Of course, her teacher’s brother had once told her that sex for its own sake was brilliant, but she’d never been that in need of sex that she’d been unwilling to abstain. Mary wondered for a moment at her student’s naiveté, but abstained. He would grow out of it, they all did._

_“So how do I fit in to your life?” A change of subject, and Mary had felt so proud of that in retrospect, that Kareem was able to avoid things now instead of being unable to take a passive route. Some things one had to put aside so as to decide how to approach it, that was the best wording in her opinion._

_“Grandmother?” Her first thought, and he shook his head. He wasn’t physically young enough, or her old enough, to present as such._

_“Is your current alias a widow?” He asked. Her eyes lit up. “Son from a first marriage. Stepson. I decided to move in with you because I’m worried that you’ll get lonely here in LA. I’m going for my law degree.” He was smiling, and she nodded. “I got into the law school at UCLA, so there isn’t a problem with that. I’m officially living with you because living together is less damaging to our finances. Plus I can feed the cat,” He glanced at the Manx, sitting like a queen across the living room from the bar across which they had been arguing. She was a gorgeous thing, if curiously calico._

_“Querida.” Mary supplied her cat’s name at his inquiring look. “I’ve said that she’s my life partner, that she keeps me from getting lonely.”_

_“Querida, and I can water your plants while you’re undercover.” And he smiled at that, Immortals were always undercover, covering themselves in lies to survive._

_“That would work.”_

_~End flashback~_

            “Farressi, you know how I’d asked you if you could water my plants and take in Querida while I’m undercover?” Mary glanced at her partner, whose head was already buried in the logistics of placing Mary undercover in Los Angeles by Friday, creating a ‘Deep Cover’ identity.

            From her desk she could see his computer screen if she spun in her chair, the rental company of a moderately priced condominium on the screen. He probably was comparing prices and placement, trying to see what he would be willing to sacrifice for their goal. She was going to start in a few moments, looking into the general business plan of setting up this brothel thought. Traditionally, she’d once bought a hotel, offered rooms and a barracks’ to travelers, and keeping rooms with women set aside solely for their use and the use of their clients, but now that would be a suspicious prospect. More likely, she thought, it would be a better idea to rent a similar idea.

            “Yeah?” Farressi raised an eyebrow. “Mary.” His partner’s eyes were starting to glaze, probably thinking of possibilities. “Mary, snap out of it.”

“Oh. Plants. Querida.” Mary was back in the office, addressing the problem. “My stepson, Kareem Ali, has decided to move in with me: he got into a law school here in LA, and he wants to cut our costs. So you don’t need to help.” Kareem, Farressi thought. Kareem. Kareem Said? Her student was still with her? His Watchers’ had reported him dead in Nimes sixteen months ago.

“Your stepson?” Tony asked. “I wasn’t aware that you were married.” He knew she wasn’t, she’d complained about a misbehaving date a few weeks back.

“I’m widowed. Harun Ali was my husband, died before I joined the FBI. I was doing accounting for his company before he died, and after his death I couldn’t keep it up. Kareem was his son from his first wife, and Kareem and I are close, as the two surviving members of the family. He’s here ostensibly to live with me and save costs, but I know that he’s worried about a woman my age living in Los Angeles alone.”

“May I meet him?” Tony was laughing inside. “And he’s worried about his stepmother, who works in Sex Crimes at the FBI, and carries a gun for work?”

“Yes.” And then his partner was smiling, and Tony couldn’t help but be happy that he’d taken the assignment to Watch her. He got to be friends with his assignment, not to mention, like her as a person. “You could come over for dinner tonight, meet Kareem and see Querida?”


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter Five

            Kareem had chosen to return to his teacher at the end of his time with the Trade Family, as she called it, for certain reasons that he still wasn’t quite sure of. His method of choice now was to write out his issues, to try and commit to following through on a line of though until he understood it. It was an idea that his teacher had given back at OZ, and honestly, that was the basis of his thoughts.

_She’s a woman who posed as a woman of faith, and she isn’t. That still sticks in my mind, having been her student for years. Mary, not Sister Peter Marie, and she’s assured me that Mary is not her first name. I cannot reconcile the Catholicism that she embraced so deeply and visibly to the world and herself, and her close relationship with Father Mukada, with her as she is now. I’ve never told my teacher, though I’m sure she knows, that I’ve seen her pouring libations. I’ve never asked to whom, and I’ve never asked why._

_I didn’t want to take the choices that she gave me. I thought that our training was going well, and her sudden disagreement with the status quo /scared/ me. That’s the emotion. Startled and made uncertain would also work as descriptive phrases, phrasing that she would have insisted on in sessions years ago. Some days I can’t help but wonder if her insistence on embracing one’s emotions has a basis in her history._

_But she’s herself, and she’s found something else. Maybe for her, it’s about the belief, not the religion. She certainly seems to believe quite heavily in her work for the FBI. Sexual Crimes? She’s counseled both sides of the equation, to my knowledge, and that’s in the last fifteen years. She certainly cares, but not about me._

_Now would be the appropriate time for cursing—I learned one from Ceoc that he said he learned in Jerusalem : ‘May your women and your camels love only each other and your only pleasure come from that,’ and I don’t think that it’s appropriate for this. A good insult, though_. _Ceoc surprised me. She gave me three choices on where to go. Marcus Constantine, an old friend who spent a great deal of time attempting to conquer, and has since calmed down. The so-called ‘Trade Family,’ technically of the line of Martos: apparently he was a guy who thought the Immortals were kin to gods, and should act as such. I can’t seem to find much information on him other than that. No one seems to like him, and even Ceoc, who was his student, called him a man who traded falsities. Not fakes, they don’t seem to mind selling that: Dade said that the motto that they lived by was ‘Caveat Emptor’ ‘let the buyer beware,’ but falsities. What exactly is a falsity? And a third person. One Sunda Kastagir, and when I asked Mary who he was, she said ‘a scoundrel, rogue, thief, and drunkard. Also the best lay I’ve had in awhile,’ and that last bit put me off of him for a bit. She’s old!_

_And gods, does that sound silly of me. I’ve almost hit sixty now, and I died a few years after I hit forty. It seems hypocritical, but she seems like a grandmother to me. But Ceoc. I chose the trade family because she said that they would be good at teaching me versatility._

_Versatility? I met Dade Winston at the airport in Amsterdam. He’s built big, and his build reminds me of some types of football players: big shoulders, broad chests, tapering down to a small waist. Dade’s got this ‘good-ole-Southern boy’ thing going on, and he practically drawled it all over me. I took a dislike to the man with a Peugeot sedan almost immediately, and when he took me back to their place outside Amsterdam, it didn’t help with anything._

            Kareem put the pen down, shoved his chair back from the desk. Thankfully his cover here was as a writer, and he could get away with crazy hours and taking classes.

Jumping up from the chair, Kareem walked back through his bedroom and away from his desk, into the kitchen. There was a small bathroom attached to the kitchen/living room/dining room, but it was a half bath, so if he’d wanted a shower, he would have to use the master bath off of his teacher’s room. That didn’t stop him from exclaiming in pain when he walked by the doorknob to the bathroom, bumping his thigh on his way to the kitchen sink and the refridgerator next to it. A bottle of tea came out of the shelves, Mary had brewed it this morning and bottled it after she had her morning cup. Ice went into the glass that he pulled out of the cupboard above the sink, and he poured the tea over the ice. Technically the tea, with it’s caffeine content altered minds, so it’s conformity to Islamic food laws was questionable. However, the black tea was made and drank traditionally by many Muslims, as was hot coffee. His adherence to clarity of mind could also be considered to be aided by either beverage, as they were traditionally avenues to create clarity of thought. Whichever was correct, one could not doubt that the drink that he poured over the ice was exceptional, and a good break from his emotions before he went back to his desk and started writing again.

_It was ornamental. That’s probably the first description that comes to mind. The walls were painted stark white, but the paintings and photography were decadent: photos of human nudes, paintings of an erotic nature. I at first thought that we were at a brothel._

_The fact that one of the photos was of my teacher, long hair the only distraction and cover for parts of her body perhaps ratcheted up my distaste a notch._

_Three days later, I found out that Lorne Skele currently made his money, at least the money that wasn’t from investments or trade, in artwork. He’d taken all of the photographs, and indeed, done many of the earlier paintings. It didn’t detract from the distaste I perhaps still feel in how I found that out: he was taking photographs of his teacher and himself. I was shocked. Disgusted. Certainly disdainful. I was about to leave when Ceoc pointed out some facts._

_First, that I could not take on a man my size with a sword. Certainly with fists, my training was good from OZ, but not with a sword, and the knife that some Immortals will use in swordfights. Second, that my teacher would not take me back if they did not dismiss me first. And thirdly, that no move would be or had been made on me while in their home. Lorne and Ceoc practice monogamy._

_Three years later, Ceoc told me how he met Mary. And I really should put this in his words._

_“She wasn’t the prettiest whore in the place, and in fact, I think the only reason that the owner of the whore-house hadn’t killed her off—she was a slave, you must understand that, Kareem. He didn’t have the legal right to- the brothel was government owned, and she was owned by the government, kept in a dark squalid place, a bit of an oddity because her eyes weren’t slanted like the Koreans or Japanese that they used to staff those places._

_I really don’t like to think about why I was in one of those places, but it’s pretty simple. We were finally on the continent, and I was pushing in with some of the Russians, and that was that, they’d come across one of the Japanese Army Encampments and killed off most of the soldiers. We’d left the supplies, the water, and the entertainment alone—well, not alone._

_Gods, I wish I’d stayed out of that war. I’m still not certain how exactly Miriam, and that was the name that I met her under, Miriam Strakovski, got to China in 1945. There’s documented proof of her internment with David Strakovski at a Polish death camp in 1938, and she told me that he died there. He was her husband, apparently._

_I found her because of her buzz. I felt it walking beside the whores’ house, and it soared through me, and honestly? It grated. I’ve felt her since, she kind of hums along with an inner drive, but she was out of tune, and I had to find out.” And I remember that Ceoc got quiet at that point, swallowed some of the brandy in his snifter. He was rubbing at his wrists, a tell that I think may be his only one left._

_“I raped her, had to put on a good enough show to convince my boss to let me take her back to my bunk, and honestly, I think she was the first woman that I’d slept with in five centuries. Lorne and I found each other in the sixteenth century, and that was that, but I was certainly not celibate in the years before that.” He paused again, a larger gulp of brandy, a sigh._

_“Lorne knows I slept with Miriam. He doesn’t know that I raped her the first time, and that sometimes I thought that my use of her body helped her crawl back to sanity. I really don’t know. She stayed with Lorne and I after the war for about fifteen years._

_“The thing is, Lorne and I have been monogamous for five centuries. That doesn’t mean that we’re always in the same vicinity, by the gods, I’d have killed him by know if we were. And there were times when we would be risking death to be together in the same place. They used to use men who slept with other men as the firewood in the witch burnings.” And it was an apparent non sequitor, but that tell was there again, and I knew something for a moment. There was always some form of hatred in a society._

_Perhaps that’s why Mary had me study with Lorne and Ceoc, not to forget Dade. She could have taken me to an appropriate class to try and get my reach to stretch, but she chose to send me to them. Sometimes I forget that my teacher is not just elderly in looks, but old in age; she once told me that she predated or was of an age to remember the Battle of Thermopylae being spoken of._


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter Six

            Marianne Myers wasn’t all that boring. Paid her rent by direct deposit, wore clothes that didn’t cost a mint, but perhaps cost a pretty penny.

            That was the beginning. Sitting in her cover-apartment, Mary considered her options. She wasn’t the most gorgeous dame in the world, as Ceoc had told her years before, and that was in her favor. The life of the street whore stole the faces from prostitutes, and even from sex workers of the type that Mary wanted to portray her brothel as, and herself as the madam.

            The thing was that Mary had worked in the sex industry before, as a whore, as a madam, and now in Sex Crimes. Her instincts as to how to run a brothel were nowhere as near to trashy as she knew that she would have to perform to try and lure in the target, men who sold people to other people, including women for sex. At the same time, she’d have to balance that with the experience that their contact Nella was actually quite harmless, a woman whose instincts were that those who sold sex were more akin to athletes or dancers, utilizing their bodies to make money. Mary thought that those who sold sex must do it of their own volition, but Marianne was a little less strict on that front, perhaps thinking that what she didn’t know or verbalize wouldn’t hurt her. She was a little corrupted, her cover was.

            One hand rubbed down her pants’ leg, touching and rubbing at the fabric, playing with the pleats. She’d say that she was buying them for their safety, but she wasn’t going to admit that she probably wasn’t doing anything of the sort. Marianne, call me Anna, liked the appearance of things in many ways, and not the reality. The apartment looked chic and glossy, but the paint was too bright, the furniture and fixtures expensive but not quality.

            It meant things for the brothel itself. There were three locations that the FBI had okayed for the operation. One was a former house, almost Victorian in style, in an acceptable neighborhood. Unfortunately it lacked two things, parking and discretion. Mary’s investigations into the house was that it was a security risk because of the curiosity of the neighbors. The Victorian was a no-go, plus it was cliché.

The second option was a warehouse. Big and broad, it had no internal wall structure built, and a floating platform up towards the rafters, which could be disguised if needed, and certainly used in the operation. There was parking, and discretion. The problem was that it was almost in a shady area of town, in an area just about to be scheduled for urban renewal. It wouldn’t attract the best clientele, but, as Marianne reflected, the best clientele weren’t exactly what she was looking for.

The third option was a condo, which Marianne thought impractical. There would be neighbors to complain to the police about noise, and monthly co-op dues in the building that they were looking at. There was also very little freedom of entrance and exit, which was against the point of the exercise. Besides, the condominium, no matter its size, would be a death trap if the operation went bad. And the last point against it was the lack of parking. Sure, it was close to the federal building, which explained why it got on this list, but the entire place was wired for surveillance in the hallways, ostensibly to watch for potential home burglary, probably for the co-op council to make a little money on the side with photography and video of misbehaving tenants. No, certainly not the condo.

So it would be the warehouse, and Mary had ideas on how to make that safe for the prostitutes and the agents involved. It was a big warehouse, and her thoughts were simple. Start with dividing the warehouse lengthwise into five sections, make the front area a lobby but leave the central section to lead away from the lobby—inbetween the front set of rooms. The second set of rooms, behind the first set would be housing, food, and recreation, not to mention safety. Two bouncers on duty would be her ideal choice, two bouncers for each side of that central hallway. There would be a receptionist in the lobby, or rather, a woman who was acting as host and entertainer to alleviate any potential waiting time that the brothel would involve. The problem with that would be that the setting would seem overly clinical.

She would mask the height of the roof of the warehouse in the lobby with sheer fabric: allowing any agents on duty on the floating porch to view any people in the waiting room. The entire place had to look and feel real, but the goal of this wasn’t to catch potential patrons or prostitutes, it was to capture those who sold women into sexual slavery. It would work, Mary thought, and stood from the chair that furnished her cover-apartment.

Five steps took her into the kitchen and to the tea kettle that had roused her out of her thoughts. There was a tea flower already in her glass teapot and she poured the singing kettle into the pot and took out the tea cup that she would use. The goal of the mission wasn’t to try and take on the world, only to set a very nice trap and snap it shut around slavers. There would be agents posing as patrons and prostitutes, and she’d handpicked the two who would be her cover’s original stock.

Agent Lissy O’Reilly was not Sex Crimes, but she’d done a stint with the Narcotics team. Narcotics frequently ran into and dealt with the ATF and the DEA—rarely the most composed or straightlaced of the government agencies’ agents, and Mary’d met the woman and thought it bled over. She was married to a fellow Agent in White Collar Crime, who would be posing as a patron every once in awhile, but Mary had chosen the woman for one other detail. She was late twenties, early thirties, and smoked. It was noticeable in her skin, lightly beginning to dry out. In other words, Agent O’Reilly was starting to age, look a little like the worn-out woman that she needed to look like for her cover.

Agent Sahara Perry was single, and actually was just an Agent as of a month before. Agent Perry’s name had come across Mary’s desk as a potential agent for Sex Crimes for one reason: she’d come to the FBI by way of the LAPD. And she’d made detective at the LAPD: Vice, with a specialization in undercover. It wasn’t that Agent O’Reilly was without practice with undercover, it was rather that Agent Perry was perfect for this. Sex Crimes had Jordan Holland, but she was the only female agent permanently assigned to Sex Crimes, and thought of this type of undercover as beneath her. Honestly, Mary’d observed her on this type of operation before, and thought her so unskilled that it was only her instincts on solicitation and blackmail that had allowed her to do her job. Agent Perry was skilled, according to three tapes [borrowed from the LAPD evidence locker] and a life-long cop over at the LAPD Vice Division.

Lifting the teacup, Mary realizing that she’d poured it moments before and deciding to drink it now. Raspberry with a touch of lemon, and there were her female team. She’d briefed them the morning before, and they would all meet with her at the Starbucks three blocks from this apartment in the morning, after she called the ‘real estate agent’ –or rather her partner Farressi, about her choice in buildings for the operations. Actually, she wouldn’t break her cover if she called tonight to make the choice and left it on the answering machine. That would give her more time to drink tea and consider the physical layout of the operational as well as the potential emotional.

When she’d realized that Ambrosios, Gaius, George Adams, all these names were his, was back by Nella’s warning, she’d forgotten what it would stir up inside her, the roiling memories and the unhappiness. But perhaps this time ‘unhappiness’ would end sharply. A sword’s blade would work.


End file.
